第20章

She rose and leaned out of the window.The twilight had deepened into night, and she watched the frail curve of the young moon dropping to the edge of the hills.Through the darkness she saw one or two figures moving down the road; but the evening was too cold for loitering, and presently the strollers disappeared.

Lamps were beginning to show here and there in the windows.A bar of light brought out the whiteness of a clump of lilies in the Hawes's yard: and farther down the street Carrick Fry's Rochester lamp cast its bold illumination on the rustic flower-tub in the middle of his grass-plot.

For a long time she continued to lean in the window.

But a fever of unrest consumed her, and finally she went downstairs, took her hat from its hook, and swung out of the house.Mr.Royall sat in the porch, Verena beside him, her old hands crossed on her patched skirt.

As Charity went down the steps Mr.Royall called after her: "Where you going?" She could easily have answered: "To Orma's," or "Down to the Targatts'"; and either answer might have been true, for she had no purpose.But she swept on in silence, determined not to recognize his right to question her.

At the gate she paused and looked up and down the road.

The darkness drew her, and she thought of climbing the hill and plunging into the depths of the larch-wood above the pasture.Then she glanced irresolutely along the street, and as she did so a gleam appeared through the spruces at Miss Hatchard's gate.Lucius Harney was there, then--he had not gone down to Hepburn with Mr.

Miles, as she had at first imagined.But where had he taken his evening meal, and what had caused him to stay away from Mr.Royall's? The light was positive proof of his presence, for Miss Hatchard's servants were away on a holiday, and her farmer's wife came only in the mornings, to make the young man's bed and prepare his coffee.Beside that lamp he was doubtless sitting at this moment.To know the truth Charity had only to walk half the length of the village, and knock at the lighted window.She hesitated a minute or two longer, and then turned toward Miss Hatchard's.

She walked quickly, straining her eyes to detect anyone who might be coming along the street; and before reaching the Frys' she crossed over to avoid the light from their window.Whenever she was unhappy she felt herself at bay against a pitiless world, and a kind of animal secretiveness possessed her.But the street was empty, and she passed unnoticed through the gate and up the path to the house.Its white front glimmered indistinctly through the trees, showing only one oblong of light on the lower floor.She had supposed that the lamp was in Miss Hatchard's sitting-room; but she now saw that it shone through a window at the farther corner of the house.She did not know the room to which this window belonged, and she paused under the trees, checked by a sense of strangeness.Then she moved on, treading softly on the short grass, and keeping so close to the house that whoever was in the room, even if roused by her approach, would not be able to see her.

The window opened on a narrow verandah with a trellised arch.She leaned close to the trellis, and parting the sprays of clematis that covered it looked into a corner of the room.She saw the foot of a mahogany bed, an engraving on the wall, a wash-stand on which a towel had been tossed, and one end of the green-covered table which held the lamp.Half of the lampshade projected into her field of vision, and just under it two smooth sunburnt hands, one holding a pencil and the other a ruler, were moving to and fro over a drawing-board.

Her heart jumped and then stood still.He was there, a few feet away; and while her soul was tossing on seas of woe he had been quietly sitting at his drawing-board.The sight of those two hands, moving with their usual skill and precision, woke her out of her dream.

Her eyes were opened to the disproportion between what she had felt and the cause of her agitation; and she was turning away from the window when one hand abruptly pushed aside the drawing-board and the other flung down the pencil.

Charity had often noticed Harney's loving care of his drawings, and the neatness and method with which he carried on and concluded each task.The impatient sweeping aside of the drawing-board seemed to reveal a new mood.The gesture suggested sudden discouragement, or distaste for his work and she wondered if he too were agitated by secret perplexities.Her impulse of flight was checked; she stepped up on the verandah and looked into the room.

Harney had put his elbows on the table and was resting his chin on his locked hands.He had taken off his coat and waistcoat, and unbuttoned the low collar of his flannel shirt; she saw the vigorous lines of his young throat, and the root of the muscles where they joined the chest.He sat staring straight ahead of him, a look of weariness and self-disgust on his face: